Found a new site, American Square Dancer, an online magazine “designed to offer up-to-date schedule of events, lessons and news thoughout the nation.” It looks like a one-person (Rob Scribner) production, along with a couple of sister publications, Washington Square Dancer and Oregon Square Dancer Magazine. Rob was a teen caller in the Pacific Northwest, dropped out of calling for about 10 years, and started again in 1999. He lives in Oregon, so the Oregon site has the most info; the other sites contain the same stuff, without the Oregon-specific info.

I like his editorial (although he does have a slight homonym problem) and his focus on teen dancers. (Where Have All the Teens Gone?). I hope he’s able to keep things up; it’s nice to have somebody with both vision (starting up a national online publication) and web know-how (looks like Rob might own a web-hosting, web-design service, which is offering special packages to square dance groups: Web Support Program.

I think Rob may see this as a profit-making venture, where he’ll be able to charge for listings (see his introduction. (He’s only accepting listings through September 2000.) He may need to rethink that, since there are other sites that list events for free, and instead try to go for an advertiser-supported model.

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I’d forgotten about this: Patricia Wahle’s Dancer Survey. It’s several years old but contains some interesting info about why people (including younger people) square dance. Of course, the more interesting survey would be with people who tried square dancing and rejected it, or who thought about trying it and didn’t.

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Many square dance pictures: Mike Argue’s photo albums. Here we have a photographic record of a lot of square dances; you can see what square dancing is like, at least in the midwest.

Mike appears to have a lot of good stuff on his site, but I’m having a hard time getting to it because my browser doesn’t like his scripts, so I don’t get the navigation links. However, I did manage (by convoluted means that you don’t want to hear about) to get to his Square Dance Greeting Cards site…an idea whose time has not (yet) come. It’s not only that the graphics are the same (tired) graphics that one sees on virtually every square dance website (probably because they’re in the public domain) but also that retrieving the card once it’s been sent is no simple one-click operation. In other web-based greeting card setups, the recipient gets a link in an email message and then just clicks on the link: voila! she’s transported to the greeting card. With this one, I (yes, I sent a greeting card to myself to check it out) had to navigate to the greeting card page (no easy task with my apparently non-compliant browser), click on the view button, and then enter in the code number that was sent in the email notification. Now I know Amazon has one-click buying patented, but this was ridiculous. How hard would it be to encode the card id number and Mike’s referral info into the URL that the recipient can click in her email message?

Now what would be cool would be to license Stan Burdick’s cartoons to put on greeting cards; they’d be funny, might even be relevant to a particular holiday, and would be different from anything else currently on the web.